I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous biographies were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in socialism. Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to contemplate the rise of one of the most oppressive regimes in human history. I have gathered some thoughts and impressions here and I hope they will be of interest.

Hunger and starvation have so often accompanied political revolution that it would be safe to suggest that they are intrinsic parts of it. Communist revolutions have invariably produced famines and terror. The immediate trigger for revolutionary terror in early Soviet Russia was the same as in the French Revolution: the inability of the regime to obtain food for urban residents.

The Bolsheviks had never had very much interest in the peasants in the first place. As great believers in Marxist theology, they advocated the imposition by the proletariat of urban workers of its will upon the country, including upon the agricultural laborers who constituted the bulk of the population. Even if the Bolshevik party could seriously be thought to represent the urban proletariat, they would still have constituted a movement representing only a very small portion of Russian society. Thus bolshevisms most basic operating principles were anti-democratic.

The Bolsheviks represented a movement seeking to impose the interests of this minority class over the interests of the bulk of Russian society (and later over non-Russian populations in the Soviet empire). The role assigned by the communists to the peasants was to sit back and turn over food to the revolution, either without getting paid for it or without getting paid very much. The Bolshevik state procurement of food operated through a state-run monopoly, preventing peasants from seeking better prices, and increasingly turned violent when peasants refused to cooperate. The communists considered payment of incentives to peasants for delivering food to be anti-revolutionary and capitalist. The most violent stages of the French Revolution had been triggered by similar inability of the revolutionary state to procure adequate food for urban workers. Armed gangs of Soviet foragers, like Parisian foragers before them in the French revolution, emptied the stores of food in rural areas in a desperate attempt to prevent their own loss of power.

The other problem for the Bolsheviks was of course that they claimed to represent the working class of urban workers, but never considered it necessary to allow those same members of the proletariat a say in what they themselves considered their class interests to be. The communist party leaders claimed to represent the proletariat automatically, supernaturally, by dint of their having studied Marx and Engels. Under their theology they could automatically divine from the dusty 80 year old writings of Marx what served the interests of the Russian working class, without having to ask any actual workers, and in most cases without having to engage in actual work. Party leaders, led by Lenin and Trotsky, lived bourgeois lives even in the most difficult days of the Russian Civil War, often living in luxurious royal apartments inside the Kremlin (which had been the royal residence before the Revolution). Soviet leaders were attended by large numbers of servants, and Trotsky himself never went anywhere during the Civil War without both his large flock of servants and a 35-member military band. Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky in particular) generally had never done a day of honest labor in their lives in any factory or farm; their entire careers consisting of political activism.

The Bolsheviks believed that they could divine the answers to what the workers collectively needed in much the same way that Church clergy could conjure up the agenda of God, by reading the holy scriptures. And like other manifestations of theology, the Bolsheviks tended to bicker and break up into small factions over minor questions of belief. Like in the Church, the factionalism was suppressed by means of the proclamation of official dogma approved by the partys Pope. It was the beginning of the thought police system, later perfected by Mao.

In the case of communists, these scriptures meant Marx and Engels, and later Lenin. The problem of course was that Marx and Engels never spelled out the nitty gritty details of what workers would need, and basically had no understanding whatsoever of economics. They can hardly be excused for this ignorance on grounds of writing before the advent of modern economic understanding, because it was already well on the course of development at that time.

As just one example of the problem, should the price of shoes in a workers state be high in order to benefit shoe workers producing shoes, or low to benefit workers who are consumers? And if the representatives of the proletariat cannot make up their minds about the price of shoes, then how the Devil can they decide what constitutes worker interest in thousands of other dilemmas. Asking the workers themselves what they wanted was quickly ruled out by the Bolsheviks as a counter-revolutionary nonstarter.

The solution of the early Soviet regime was essentially to suppress and terrorize urban workers, not just the peasants. Before the end of the Civil War, Lenin and Trotsky were ordering all independent labor unions, meaning those that were not simply servile fronts for the party, to be suppressed. Lenin and Trotsky insisted that unions represented and promoted only the narrow interests of selected groups of proletarians and not of the entire class. Exactly!

In fact, the alienation of the urban workers by the party had occurred even earlier. The Bolshevik coup and the storming of the Winter Palace were uprisings of the working class only in party mythology. The bulk of those rising up in support of the Bolsheviks were soldiers in the Czarist or Kerenski armies, who supported the party because of the promise by Lenin to surrender to the Central powers and end all fighting and mobilization of troops.

The Bolshevik banner may have featured the hammer of the urban worker with the sickle of the peasant, but at the time of the Revolution it was little more than a party of disgruntled soldiers and sailors, most from rural background, reluctant to be sent back to the World War I front to defend Russia. Their opportunistic support for the Bolsheviks largely vanished in thin air as soon as the party tried to mobilize them and send them out to fight the whites during the civil war. Trotsky was forced to recruit ex-czarist officers to serve as commanders in the Red Army.

The main groups of soldiers supporting the party with enthusiasm were non-Russians desiring the end of Russian domination over their native lands, like the brigades of Latvian riflemen who served as Lenins praetorian guards. By 1921, the same Kronstadt sailors who had been critical in bringing the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 were shooting them and organizing a massive mutiny, brutally suppressed by the communists. The suppression of the rebellion led Whittaker Chambers to label bolshevism a form of fascism, and persuaded many of those who contributed later to the book, The God that Failed, to abandon communism. As in the French Revolution, all opposition was automatically attributed by the Revolutionaries to foreign conspiracies. Dissent was a form of treason.

Bolshevik thinking in the early days carried strong features of theology. The Bolsheviks believed that if they were to follow the precepts of Marx to the letter, and pronounce the correct incantations, then magic would take place and socialist revolutions would spring up all over the world like adorable leprechauns. This voodoo Marxism eventually led to the rise of Stalin and totalitarian socialism in one country. And an ice pick in the skull of Trotsky.

Most Bolshevik leaders had no skills or experience in government administration, management, business, or anything else. Their only claim to legitimacy was their assertion that they understood the needs of the proletariat. Trotsky believed in command control and central planning of the economy until his last breath, and he was hardly alone. Within days of seizing power in their coup detat, the Bolshevik leaders were seeking to impose their dictatorship of the proletariat, by which they meant the dictatorship of those party officials, more often than not from middle class backgrounds, claiming to represent the proletariat. The Russian economy imploded under their rule. Output of Russian factories and mines in 1921 was only a seventh of what it had been under the Czar in 1913.

Their understanding of foreign powers and diplomacy was even more pathetic than their ignorance of economics, and was also dominated by belief in magic. During the first years of the Soviet regime, its leaders quite seriously expected communist revolutions to break out all over Europe. And they were truly surprised when none did, except pathetic attempts  quickly suppressed  to install bolshevism in Germany and Hungary.

Part of their problem was that Marx and Engels were themselves wrong with regard to just about everything. They were wrong, first and foremost, with regard to the claim that there exists some sort of monolithic working class with some sort of uniform set of class interests. Urban workers share no common interest, as the above example involving shoe prices illustrates. Urban workers indeed were a class with a common interest only in the most tautological sense, only in the sense that all those assigned to any class would favor increases in the incomes and wealth for all members of that class. By the same token, people with curly hair constitute a class, because any proposal to raise incomes for all those with curls would be supported by them. But regarding any other issue that would arise, the curly headed would have no common interest. Ditto for urban workers. And in the exact same sense, there is no capitalist class. An assembly of the capitalist class would similarly be incapable of agreeing over whether shoe prices should be high or low.

And just why were urban workers even considered to be politically superior to everyone else in society? Marx, Engels and the Soviet leadership had great difficulty conceiving of anyone doing productive work unless they were making things. And heavy things were more valuable, important, and productive than light things. Certainly producing services was not understood by them as productive labor, explaining why the quality of services of all sorts in the Soviet block remained abysmal all the way down to the fall of communism.

But just what was a worker? Do not bankers and teachers and dentists and engineers and pharmacists work? In many cases, they work longer hours than factory workers. Marx and Engels had insisted that urban factory workers must seize political control of society, and they must do so by means of a dictatorship by the party claiming to speak in their name. In any case, Marx and Engels were pretty sure that peasants did not really provide important work. After all, they just produce food. So they need not really be part of any revolutionary regime.

Peasant reluctance to deliver food products to the urban masses without getting paid was counter-revolutionary and could be resolved by starving them to death, terrorizing them, and locking them up in non-productive collective farms. There food production would prove too low even to feed the peasants themselves, let alone export food to the cities. The Bolsheviks were truly surprised when it turned out that their policies had driven the bulk of the peasants to support the whites and other opposition forces in the Civil War. While agrarian collectivism was relaxed briefly under the New Economic Policy of Lenins last days, it then became an instrument of genocide under Stalin.

The other problem of the Bolsheviks was that, at least in the early stages of the Revolution, they were truly captivated by utopian delusions. The problem of all utopians is that they advocate systems and ideas that can only work with imaginary idyllic humans, but never with real human beings. When they discover that real human beings refuse to knuckle under and behave according to utopian expectations, the utopianists respond with violent rage. The greatest strength of capitalism is that it actually works with real human beings, people who are lazy, base, narcissistic, self-indulgent, foul-smelling, mean-spirited, and unsophisticated. Capitalism does not require idyllic fictional humans in order for it to work.

The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.

Classical economics is not a “system” but an accurate description of how people interact on a daily basis. In other words, Classical Economics (capitalism, or supply side capitalism) is a description of how people make daily decisions on how much money or goods or services to give up to procure things or services or power which they perceive to have marginally more value than the money or goods in their hand. That is economics.

When you depart from this classical model you no longer have an economic system, but a political system. When you start to centrally plan the value producing activities and their distribution you have decreased the economy because economics is nothing more than people making decisions and trading values. In essence the less the masses have decisions in value and its production, THE LESS ECONOMY YOU HAVE.

The Soviet economy at its height during Brezhnev’s reign never produced anymore than 1/4 of the US living standard on a per capita basis. Miserable performance because it was a political system that had nothing to do with economics.

The librarian Karl Marx was a good politician and a really horrifyingly bad economist. He and his illiterate minions were responsible for the deaths of 140 million people in the 20th century and Socialism can be counted as the largest disaster to have happened in Mankind’s history.

It is contrary to human nature. It will only work by force. That is what is wrong with it.

well, that's communism as a whole.

Bolshevism is the creation of a party of "elite" "elect" (but not elected) folks on top -- Bolshies are an oligarchy, which is according to human nature. The policies they tried to implement on the lower masses (communist policies) including utter control of supply and demand was communism and THAT is contrary to human nature.

Only in a monastery or a kibbutz or to some extent a university can free sharing of resources occur. It doesn't work outside this rarefied world and even the monasteries, kibbutzes and universities interact with the capitalist economy, but as a united group of individuals. Communism is a failure and hard socialism that is practised by the democrats of today is also going to be a failure...

9
posted on 11/29/2012 6:37:09 AM PST
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

Bureaucracies are self-imploding, and thats really about all socialism is. True . What looks like the socialist star rising is in reality the last gasp.They have run out of other peoples money and the beast must be fed. It's going to get ugly from here.

I thought about the push for secession we saw after the election, many articles about it here on FR. The mostly agricultural midwest and the south going their way, let the northeast and left coast go theirs. "We'll have the food supply, we'll starve out the northeast and left coast" were typical comments we heard.

But the northeast and left coast are Marxists. They are not going to sit back and let the "peasant" lower classes of "flyover country" starve them out anymore than the Bolshevists did in the article. Marxists impose their will by force.

If secession were to work here, it would have to defeat the Marxists militarily. Which the "White army" in revolutionary Russia failed to do in their war against the "Reds." Military confrontation would be inevitable. If secession has any chance it will be by people who are willing to fight and die for their freedom...and to prevail in it. Most don't have the stomach for it.

One of the other aspects of Marxism that is only tangentially discussed it this:

The belief that any number of experts can control and direct an economy is a direct result of hubris, a belief that one group is so expert at what they do that they can make decisions that are always correct in directing an economy. Oddly enough there is no known example in world history which would support that view as national and regional economies are simply too complex to be managed by a few.

In the case of the Soviet Union, the political system was enforced by guns and blood and the result was that the economy never developed as it would have normally. It was reduced and the potential for growth was reduced by this hubris of the Apparatchiki, the elite who fancied themselves the experts (they weren’t).

As we adventure through the next four years keep this in mind:

It simply is not possible for a centralized government to direct an economy. They can make some activities less desirable by taxing them or regulating them out of existence but the market (the economy, the people) will eventually redirect efforts that they cannot foresee. As we saw in the Soviet Union in the nineties when the Soviet flag was taken down. That was a decision by the market that the cost of the political regime was too high for the goods and services and resulting lifestyles delivered.

The best path for us in the future is to elect leaders in all arms of government who will do as little as possible to bother people so that they the people will be free to create the economy that they wish. A light hand in government, a hand that rarely touches the decision making capacity of the people is economically the best.

"Classical economics is not a system but an accurate description of how people interact on a daily basis. In other words, Classical Economics (capitalism, or supply side capitalism) is a description of how people make daily decisions on how much money or goods or services to give up to procure things or services or power which they perceive to have marginally more value than the money or goods in their hand. That is economics."

Thank you. I spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to people that "capitalism" (a term I really don't like, much preferring "free markets") is not so much a "system" as it is simply the natural means by which civilized people satisfy their needs.

If you go back to the basest caveman existence, there are three means by which an individual can satisfy their needs and wants:

1. Kill a deer (produce for one's self). 2. Trade half your venison for a room in a cave and a place at the fire (free exchange of goods and services). 3. Kill the cave owner and take everything for yourself (taking by force or guile).

Every economic interaction between individuals, organizations and nations has ultimately been some variation of one of the above three. As much as governments are instituted to prevent and limit #3, there really is no "economic system" until government tries to become involved in #1 and #2.

The Bolsheviks understood that simple wealth redistribution wouldn't work....the rich would get all their money back within a few short years, so nothing would change....therefore the only way to achieve the change would be to simply murder them en masse. Deep down all true Communists believe that this is the only to bring about the Revolution, they will deny it, but they all truly think that way.

The system you talk about (with government intervention in #1 AND #2) is nothing more than decreasing the the rate of trading of values for perceived gain and should be undertaken with care and skepticism.

Certainly producing services was not understood by them as productive labor, explaining why the quality of services of all sorts in the Soviet block remained abysmal all the way down to the fall of communism.

Stopped reading right there. Good post up until then. Communism has not fallen, it's been disguised, and it is HERE.

FMCDH(BITS)

21
posted on 11/29/2012 7:42:13 AM PST
by nothingnew
(I fear for my Republic due to marxist influence in our government. Open eyes/see)

Hahaha...heck. I don’t know why I am laughing. Liberalism is built on so many faulty basic premises, and we have let them get away with it for years.

I think Ann Coulter once said something to the effect that they take a faulty premise and build a huge, monstrous edifice on top of it, and we crash against the edifice instead of digging at the faulty assumption.

27
posted on 11/29/2012 9:29:57 AM PST
by rlmorel
(1793 French Jacobins and 2012 American Liberals have a lot in common.)

The communists considered payment of incentives to peasants for delivering food to be anti-revolutionary and capitalist.

In the current vernacular, I believe that's "YOU didn't grow that!"

Kinda spooky how life in America today echoes the Old Country that Grandpa escaped 100 years ago, ahead (thank God!) of the Povolzhye Famine & Holodomor that wiped out millions who stayed behind.

Established in the US, hearing what happened to family in the Workers Paradise, Grandpa got himself a gun, and I'm told he noted, "Someday the Bolsheviks will come knock on the door here, but I'll be ready." Yes, Grandpa understood exactly what the Second Amendment was about: no longer an unarmed peasant at the mercy of murderous apparatchiks.

As little as ten years ago, I would consider such remarks silly & extreme, a product of his life experience. "Never in America!" I would think. Today, I feel very foolish, and sad that we've allowed the country to slide this far down the commie rabbit hole.

>>>>>Kinda spooky how life in America today echoes the Old Country that Grandpa escaped 100 years ago, ahead (thank God!) of the Povolzhye Famine & Holodomor that wiped out millions who stayed behind.<<<<<<<<

Some ten years go I’ve read an article “Good bye, America!” by Russian professor Mark Zalzberg working for US univercity.

He has immigrated to USA circa 1985 and his article has started with the idea that it can’t be published in any American paper due to some kind of censorship called editorial policies.

And his main idea was that 2000s USA has more and more similarities with 1920s Russia. He slammed PC and affirmative action as a way used by some kind of people to ruin and control American society which he joined to escape it.

I wonder if you can find this article in English. It sounded really weird long time ago but now it seems to be absolute different.

Oddly enough there is no known example in world history which would support that view as national and regional economies are simply too complex to be managed by a few

You've posted here many points I'd agree with, but check the Ancient Egypt's economy. The key to their prosperity were their irrigation channels and constructing them required nation-wide labour mobilisation. Therefore the arable land belonged either to the king, or to a temple. The same is for Ancient Middle East.

If you go back to the basest caveman existence, there are three means by which an individual can satisfy their needs and wants

Not really. No caveman would have hunted by himself, it required a collective effort of the tribe's fit men. The same is for domestic activities of their women. Cavemen would seek a higher social status to gain more. It looks like the best javelin thrower gets the largest portion and the prettier women would have interest in him.

>>>The Soviet economy at its height during Brezhnevs reign never produced anymore than 1/4 of the US living standard on a per capita basis. Miserable performance because it was a political system that had nothing to do with economics.<<<<

In fact 1/4 of the US living standard is not that bad to way too many societies.
I think socialist dictatorship is a pretty nice interim form of government for some people, for example in Middle East.
If Soviets could effectively install their version of government into Afghanistan it couldn’t be such a mess right now. Just compare former Soviet “stans” to Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Former communists are easily convertible to free republican values, unlike 7th century cavemen.

That’s why I qualified my remarks as the ‘basest’ cave man existence. Having hunting partners was in essence, a luxury, and a cave man that had become detached or expelled from his clan would have had no choice but to attempt to satisfy his own needs.

Having hunting partners was in essence, a luxury, and a cave man that had become detached or expelled from his clan would have had no choice but to attempt to satisfy his own needs.

Since cavemen were "pack animals", such lifestyle wasn't a luxury. The technology didn't allow an individual to support himself for a prolonged time. That was more like at war: a machinegunner doesn't trade his fire for a bazooka shot and vice versa. Teamwork instead; so did the cavemen, and their life was like war.

"Since cavemen were "pack animals", such lifestyle wasn't a luxury. The technology didn't allow an individual to support himself for a prolonged time. That was more like at war: a machinegunner doesn't trade his fire for a bazooka shot and vice versa. Teamwork instead; so did the cavemen, and their life was like war."

Such a lifestyle was a "luxury" for a caveman who had been isolated or expelled from his community. That aside, it still doesn't undermine my original contention and you are still wrong.

Participation in a group/team hunt (or other endeavour) still falls under my basic three means of satisfying needs. If one participates in the group freely, then it is merely a contract (albeit an unwritten one) in which one contributes their efforts to the group goal in exchange for a share of the profits...or mammoth steaks as the case may be. If one's participation in the group is coerced without any promised or real benefits, that slave will still have to resort to theft, trade or his own use of force to satisfy his needs.

So let me add to that (I have some background in high production agriculture)

As far as I know the Egyptians owned their own land. The King and the temples also owned a good deal of land which they used to support themselves, but I think that most of the land was owned outright by the peasants.

The irrigation channels and the very crude techniques used to get water out of the Nile and into the ditches didn’t look like government sponsored operations. Basically buckets on a wheel.
They also had surveyors, apparently a job description nearly as old as prostition.

Egypt did not have as many people as it does today. Chronic illness as well as extremely low ag yield by today’s standards (1/16th of today’s yield? Maybe lower..) kept the population tamped down. Since Egypt was in the water borne disease zone I suspect that dysentery and malaria were common and took a lot of Egyptians early in life.

(The death rate in Massachusetts from water borne diseases was 1/20th of the rate of the Cheasapeake Bay area in Colonial America. Massachusetts was above the latitude in which water borne disease was common. That was one of the reasons the Pilgrims landed that far North. The latitude at which water borne disease was an issue was well known to our ancestors. I had always thought that it was a bit odd that the pilgrims went to a cold snowy area on the continent, but now it makes a lot sense to me.)

I am also not sure that the irrigation operations were quite as extenisve as the yearly flooding provide a huge amount of ground water in soil that was capable of holding on to it. I used to walk our fields that were located on the Mississippi and the black dirt was amazing. A bit like walking on a mattress as the dirt compresses one half to a full inch as you walk on it.
The flooding would also decrease the the amount of free nitrogen in the soil by large amounts and would really knock back the possible yield.

I am going to look at this as it simply is question I am sure has been asked but I have never asked it myself. Thanks for the comment.

Sesostris also, they declared, made a division of the soil of Egypt among the inhabitants, assigning square plots of ground of equal size to all, and obtaining his chief revenue from the rent which the holders were required to pay him year by year. If the river carried away any portion of a man's lot, he appeared before the king, and related what had happened; upon which the king sent persons to examine, and determine by measurement the exact extent of the loss; and thenceforth only such a rent was demanded of him as was proportionate to the reduced size of his land.

Organized by regional authorities, every Egyptian had to move about thirty cubic metres of soil in about ten days every year

The building of dams and canals was done at local or regional levels, and while in the past many held irrigation to be the prime cause for the emergence of a central government, most think nowadays that the involvement of the national government in the irrigation was probably minimal: the opening and closing of the canal sluices to Lake Moeris in the Fayum in order to regulate the flow of the river must have been a task for the central authorities.

The rights to water were as important as the land it was intended to irrigate. During the Late Period at least these rights could be sold like any commodity.

So their economic life required much government adminstration. As for the performance: "From the New Kingdom there are records of yields of between 5 and 10 sacks (200 kg to 400 kg) of corn per aroura (ca. 2800 m²) - about ¾ to 1½ tons per hectare - according to the quality and location of the field."

I might point out that Trotsky agreed with many of this article's main points. His The Revolution Betrayed: What Is The Soviet Union And Where Is It Going?, published in 1936, helped earn him that ice axe to the noggin.

The principle difficulty with Bolshevism in general was that it overlaid a theoretically proletarian revolution with a decidedly non-proletarian cadre Lenin termed a "vanguard party" with its own class interests distinct from the economic ones that ostensibly drove the revolution. In short, an existing aristocracy of birth was replaced by a new one of party. It wasn't an improvement.

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